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A remarkable new collection from our finest lyric poet 'One of the
most gifted poets writing today' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'By far
the best British poet alive' SPECTATOR In this powerful, moving new
book, John Burnside takes his cue from Schiller, who recognized
that, as one thing fades, so another flourishes: everywhere and
always, in matters great and small, new life blossoms amongst the
ruins. Here, in poems that explore ageing, mortality, environmental
destruction and mental illness, Burnside not only mourns what is
lost in passing, but also celebrates the new, and sometimes
unexpected, forms that emerge from such losses. An elegy for a dead
lover ends with a quiet recognition of everyday beauty - first sun
streaming through the trees ... a skylark in the near field, flush
with song - as the speaker emerges from lockdown after a long
illness. Throughout, the poet attends to the quality of grace -
numinous, exquisite, fleeting as an angel's wing - and the broken
tryst between humankind and its spiritual and animal elements, even
with itself: the gaunt deer on the roads/like refugees. He
acknowledges the inevitability of the fading towards death, but
still finds chimes of light in the darkness - insisting that, here
and now, even in decline, the world, when given its due attention,
is all Annunciation.
A young girl, Liv, lives with her mother on a remote island in the
Arctic Circle. Her only friend is an old man who beguiles her with
tales of trolls, mermaids, and the huldra, a wild spirit who
appears as an irresistably beautiful girl, to tempt young men to
danger and death. Then two boys drown within weeks of each other
under mysterious circumstances, in the still, moonlit waters off
the shores of Liv's home. Were the deaths accidental or were the
boys lured to their doom by a malevolent spirit?
Aurochs and Auks is a deeply moving and intelligent meditation on
the natural processes of death and extinction, renewal and
continuity. Prompted by his own near-death in a time of pandemic,
John Burnside explores the history of the auroch (Bos primigenius),
the wild cattle that has become the source of so much sacred and
cultural imagery across Europe, from the Minotaur and the Cretan
bull dances to Spanish corrida traditions. He then tells the story
of the Great Auk, a curious bird whose extinction in the
mid-nineteenth century was caused by human persecution and before
stepping into multiple extinctions of the outer and inner world.
A Financial Times Book of the Year Though we might not realise it,
our collective memory of the twentieth century was defined by the
poets who lived and wrote in it. At every significant turning point
we find them, pen in hand, fingers poised at the typewriter, ready
to distil the essence of the moment, from the muddy wastes of the
Western front to the vast reckoning that came with the end of
empire. This is the first and only history of twentieth century
poetry, by the acclaimed poet, author and academic John Burnside.
Bringing together poets from times and places as diverse as Tsarist
Russia, 1960's America and Ireland at the height of the Troubles,
The Music of Time reveals how poets engaged with and shaped the
most important issues of their times - and were in their turn
affected by their context and dialogue with each other. This is a
major work of scholarship, that on every page bears witness to the
transformative beauty and power of poetry.
Over seventeen years and nine collections, John Burnside has built
- in the words of Bernard O'Donoghue - 'a poetic corpus of the
first significance', a poetry of luminous, limpid grace. His
territory is the no-man's-land of threshold and margin, the charmed
half-light of the liminal, a domestic world threaded through with
mystery, myth and longing. In this Selected Poems we can see themes
emerge and develop within the growing confidence of Burnside's
sinuous lyric poise: the place of the individual in the world, the
idea of dwelling, of home, within that community, and the lure of
absence and escape set against the possibilities of renewal and
continuity. This is consummate, immaculate work born out of a lean
and agile craftsmanship, profound philosophical thought and a
haunted, haunting imagination; the result is a poetry that makes
intimate, resonant, exquisite music.
In 'The Hoop', his first book of poems, John Burnside takes his
bearings from Celtic mythology and from landscape, especially that
of Gloucestershire. 'The things that contribute to how I work are
botanical texts and drawings, fairy stories, Celtic and Romance
literature.' The originality of his work lies in its themes -
stewardship of the land, a sense that landscape by being described
is valued and preserved - and in his disciplined eye and ear.
In this exquisite, haunting book, John Burnside describes his
coming of age from the industrial misery of Cowdenbeath and Corby
to the new world of Cambridge. This is a memoir of romance - of
lost love and the love of being lost - darkened by threat,
illuminated by glamour. The old Scots word 'glamour' means magical
charm, and the first time he was played I Put a Spell on You, John
Burnside thought he had never heard a more beautiful song - it was
an enchantment, a fascination that would turn to obsession.
Implicit in the song were all the ambiguities that intrigued him -
love, possession and danger - and this book is an exploration of
the darker side of glamour and attraction. Beginning with memories
of a brutal murder, the book follows the author through a series of
uncanny encounters with 'lost girls', with brilliant digressions on
murder ballads, voodoo, acid and insomnia, and a cast that includes
Kafka and Narcissus, Diane Arbus and Mel Lyman, The Four Tops and
Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and time spent lost in the Arctic Circle,
black-and-white films and a mental institution. Ending with the
tender summoning of the ghost of his dying mother as she sings
along to the radio in her empty kitchen, I Put a Spell on You is a
book about memory, about the other side of love: a book of secrets
and wonders.
Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover
- or more accurately, by its title. This new series aims to reprint
the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by
British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor's
brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections,
magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the
bunch to reprint all in one volume. Neither genre nor Granta shall
be overlooked in the search for the very best new short fiction.
The first book of the series includes stories published in 2010 by
the following authors: David Rose, Hilary Mantel, Lee Rourke, Leone
Ross, Claire Massey, Christopher Burns, Adam Marek, SJ Butler,
Heather Leach, Alan Beard, Kirsty Logan, Philip Langeskov, Bernie
McGill, John Burnside, Robert Edric, Michele Roberts, Dai Vaughan,
Alison Moore and Salley Vickers.
Apostasy is a remarkable new collection of fourteen poems by John
Burnside, one of the UK's foremost poets. A child struggles to
reconcile a received Catholic world-view with a more instinctive
and passionate paganism. A deep connection with the natural world
offers an imaginative and spiritual freedom.
An engaging invitation to rediscover Henry Miller-and to learn how
his anarchist sensibility can help us escape "the air-conditioned
nightmare" of the modern world The American writer Henry Miller's
critical reputation--if not his popular readership-has been in
eclipse at least since Kate Millett's blistering critique in Sexual
Politics, her landmark 1970 study of misogyny in literature and
art. Even a Miller fan like the acclaimed Scottish writer John
Burnside finds Miller's "sex books"-including The Rosy Crucifixion,
Tropic of Cancer, and Tropic of Capricorn-"boring and
embarrassing." But Burnside says that Miller's notorious image as a
"pornographer and woman hater" has hidden his vital, true
importance-his anarchist sensibility and the way it shows us how,
by fleeing from conformity of all kinds, we may be able to save
ourselves from the "air-conditioned nightmare" of the modern world.
Miller wrote that "there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a
world which is crazy," and in this short, engaging, and personal
book, Burnside shows how Miller teaches us to become less adapted
to the world, to resist a life sentence to the prison of social,
intellectual, emotional, and material conditioning. Exploring the
full range of Miller's work, and giving special attention to The
Air-Conditioned Nightmare and The Colossus of Maroussi, Burnside
shows how, with humor and wisdom, Miller illuminates the
misunderstood tradition of anarchist thought. Along the way,
Burnside reflects on Rimbaud's enormous influence on Miller, as
well as on how Rimbaud and Miller have influenced his own writing.
An unconventional and appealing account of an unjustly neglected
writer, On Henry Miller restores to us a figure whose searing
criticism of the modern world has never been more relevant.
John Burnside's remarkable book is full of strange, unnerving poems
that hang in the memory like a myth or a song. These are poems of
thwarted love and disappointment, of raw desire, of the stalking
beast, 'eye-teeth/and muzzle/coated with blood'; poems that
recognise 'we have too much to gain from the gods, and this is
why/they fail to love us'; poems that tell of an obsessive lover
coming to grief in a sequence that echoes the old murder ballads,
or of a hunter losing himself in the woods while pursuing an
unknown and possibly unknowable quarry. Drawing on sources as
various as the paintings of Pieter Brueghel and the lyrics of Delta
blues, Black Cat Bone examines varieties of love, faith, hope and
illusion, to suggest an unusual possibility: that when the search
for what we expected to find - in the forest or in our own hearts -
ends in failure, we can now begin the hard and disciplined quest
for what is actually there. Full of risk and wonder, Black Cat Bone
shows the range of Burnside's abilities, but also strikes out for
new territories. He remains consistently, though, one of our finest
living lyric poets and each of these astonishing poems is as clear
and memorable as 'a silver bracelet//falling for days/through an
inch and a half/of ice'.
In these remarkable stories, John Burnside takes us into the lives
of men and women trapped in marriage, ensnared by drink, diminished
by disappointment; all kinds of women, all kinds of men - lonely,
unfaithful, dying - driving empty roads at night. These are people
for whom the idea of 'home' has become increasingly intangible,
hard to believe - and happiness, or grace, or freedom, all now seem
to belong in some kind of dream, or a fable they might have read in
a children's picture book. As he says in one story, 'All a man has
is his work and his sense of himself, all the secret life he holds
inside that nobody else can know.' But in each of these normal,
damaged lives, we are shown something extraordinary: a dogged
belief in some kind of hope or beauty that flies in the face of all
reason and is, as a result, both transfiguring and heart-rending.
John Burnside is unique in contemporary British letters: he is one
of our best living poets, but he is also a thrillingly talented
writer of fiction. These exquisitely written pieces, each weighted
so perfectly, opens up the whole wound of a life in one moment -
and each of these twelve short stories carries the freight and
density of a great novel.
As a child, Luke's mother often tells him the story of the Dumb
House, an experiment on newborn babies raised in silence, designed
to test the innateness of language. As Luke grows up, his interest
in language and the delicate balance of life and death leads to
amateur dissections of small animals - tiny hearts revealed still
pumping, as life trickles away. But as an adult, following the
death of his mother, Luke's obsession deepens, resulting in a
haunting and bizarre experiment on Luke's own children.
The sea: turbulent and leaden,transparent and opaque,magician and mother... When Cahrles Arrowby,over sixty,a demi god of the theatre- director,playwright and actor - retires from his glittering London world in order to `abjure magic and become a hermit',it is to the sea that he turns. He hopes at least to escape from `the woman' - but unexpectedly meets one whom he loved long ago. His buddhist cousin, James, also arrives. he is menaced by a monster from the deep. Charlesfinds his `solitude' peopled by the drama of his own fantasies and obsessions.
Lucid, lyrical and intellectually profound: this collection of
poems resonates with real life and death, but mostly what falls in
between: the charmed darkness. Several ghosts haunt Learning to
Sleep, John Burnside's first collection of poetry in four years -
from the author's mother, commemorated in an exquisitely charged
variant on the pastoral elegy, to the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who
wanders an implausible Lincolnshire landscape looking for some sign
of belonging. Throughout the book, the powers and dominions of a
lost pagan ancestry emerge unexpectedly through the gaps in
contemporary life: half-seen and fleeting, but profoundly present.
Behind it all, the figure of Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, marks
Burnside's own attempts to come to terms with the severe sleep
disorder from which he has suffered for years, a condition that
culminated in the recent near-death experience that informs the
latter part of the book. Add to this a series of provocative
meditations on the ways in which we are all harmed by institutions,
from organised religion, or marriage, to the tawdry concepts of
gender and romantic love that subtly govern our personal lives, and
Learning to Sleep reveals Burnside at his most elegiac, while still
retaining a radical pagan's sense of celebration and cultural
independence. 'For my money, John Burnside is by far the best
British poet alive... I read it over and over again, marvelling at
its concision and beauty.' Cressida Connolly, Spectator ** A
SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021**
Although mostly concealed, our bedrock geology profoundly
determines what we see around us - not just our landforms, but the
built environment too, from Aberdeen, often called the "granite
city" to Bath, constructed from honey-coloured limestone- rocks
shape the world around us. In Cornerstones, some of Britain's
leading landscape and nature writers consider their relationship
with the ground beneath their feet. Distinguished by a strong sense
of place and close observation, these essays take the reader out
into the landscape and convey the tactile heft, grain and rub of
the rock, showing how it shapes our familiar landscapes. Adapted
from the successful BBC Radio Three series, Cornerstones explores
how different rock types give rise to their own distinct flora and
fauna, and even affect the food we eat.
Kate, a grieving, semi-alcoholic film student, invites an elderly
woman to take part in an oral-history documentary. Jean declines,
but makes her a bizarre counter-offer: if Kate can stay sober for
four days, she will tell her a story. If she can stay sober beyond
that, there will be another, and then another, amounting to the
entire history of one family's life. Gradually, Jean offers a
heart-breaking account, not only of her own history - a lost lover,
a family scarred by war - but of the American century itself; as a
deep connection emerges between the women which will transform both
of their lives.
A moving, unforgettable memoir of two lost men: a father and his
child. He had his final heart attack in the Silver Band Club in
Corby, somewhere between the bar and the cigarette machine. A
foundling; a fantasist; a morose, threatening drinker who was quick
with his hands, he hadn't seen his son for years. John Burnside's
extraordinary story of this failed relationship is a beautifully
written evocation of a lost and damaged world of childhood and the
constants of his father's world: men defined by the drink they
could take and the pain they could stand, men shaped by their guilt
and machismo. A Lie About My Father is about forgiving but not
forgetting, about examining the way men are made and how they fall
apart, about understanding that in order to have a good son you
must have a good father. Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and the
Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year.
Shortlisted for the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for
Best Collection 'There are lines in All One Breath for instance,
that brand themselves into your brain with the fire of painful
recognition. And yet it is also part of his genius to be ever alert
to beauty, too.' - Sebastian Barry, a New Statesman Book of the
Year In this absorbing, brilliant new collection - his first since
Black Cat Bone - John Burnside examines our shared experience of
this mortal world: how we are 'all one breath' and - with that
breath - how we must strive towards the harmony of choir.
Recognising that our attitudes to other creatures - human and
non-human - cause too much damage and hurt, that 'we've been going
at this for years: / a steady delete / of anything that tells us
what we are', these poems celebrate the fleeting, charged moments
where, through measured and gracious encounters with other lives,
we find our true selves, and bring some brief, insubstantial
goodness and beauty into being. He presents the world in a series
of still lifes, in tableaux vivants and tableaux morts, in
laboratory tests, anatomy lessons, in a Spiegelkabinett where the
reflections in the mirrors, distorted as they seem, reveal buried
truths. All the images are in some sense self-portraits: all are,
in some way, elegies. One of the finest and most celebrated lyric
poets at work today, John Burnside is a master of the moment - when
the frames of our film seem to slow and stop and a life slips
through the gap in between - and each poem here is a perfect,
uncanny hymn to humanity, set down 'to tell the lives of others'.
Since George Lister's chemical plant closed down, Innertown has
been a shadow of its former self. In the woods that once teemed
with life, strange sickly plants grow. Homes that were once happy
are threatened by a mysterious illness.
Here, a young boy named Leonard and his friends exist in a state of
confusion and despair, as every year or so a boy from their school
vanishes after venturing into the poisoned woods. Without
conclusive evidence of foul play, the authorities consider the boys
to be runaways.
The town policeman suspects otherwise but, paralyzed with fear, he
does nothing. And so it is up to the children who remain to take
action. Their plan to stop the forces of evil that are destroying
their town is at the shocking and terrifying heart of "The
Glister."
Lucid, tender, and strangely troubling, the poems in The Asylum
Dance - which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry - are hymns to the
tension between the sanctuary of home and the lure of escape. This
is territory that Burnside has made his own: a domestic world
threaded through with myth and longing, beyond which lies a no
man's land - the 'somewhere in between' - of dusk or dawn, of mists
or sudden light, where the epiphanies are. Using the framework of
four long poems, 'Ports', 'Settlements', 'Fields' and 'Roads', the
poet balances presence with absence; we are shown the homing
instinct - felt in the blood and marrow - as a pull to refuge,
simplicity, and a safe haven, while at the same time hearing the
siren call from the world beyond: the thrilling expectancy of
fairground or dancehall, the possibilities of the open road. With a
confident open line and complete command of the language, John
Burnside writes with grace, agility and profound philosophical
purpose, confirming his position in the front rank of contemporary
poetry.
To the Shakers, a good song was a gift; indeed the test of a song's
goodness was how much of a gift it was. In their call to 'labour to
make the way of God your own', Shaker artists expressed an
aesthetic that had much in common with the old Japanese notion,
attributed to Hokusai, that to paint bamboo, one had first to
become bamboo. In his tenth collection, John Burnside begins with
an interrogation of the gift song, treating matters of faith and
connection, the community of living creatures and the idea of a
free church - where faith is placed, not in dogma or a possible
credo, but in the indefinable - and moves on through explorations
of time and place, towards a tentative and idiosyncratic re-ligere,
the beginnings of a renewal of the connection to, and faith in, an
ordered world. The book closes with a series of meditations on
place, entitled 'Four Quartets', intended both as a spiritual
response to the string quartets of Bartok and Britten (as Eliot's
were to Beethoven's late quartets), and as an experiment in the
poetic form that the finest of poets, the true miglior fabbro,
chose as a medium for his own declaration of faith. The poems in
this collection are true gifts: thrillingly beautiful, charged with
power and mystery, each imbued with the generous skills of a master
of his craft.
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